Turkish court hands out sentences of up to 20 years in 'deep state' trial

A Turkish court has begun handing out lengthy jail sentences in a mass trial
of nearly 300 people accused of being part of a shadowy "deep state"
bent on overthrowing the country's Islamist government.

Protestors demonstrate against the government during a protest near the court building in Silivri, near IstanbulPhoto: EPA

A specially-convened court in a maximum security prison has heard claims that the defendants were part of the "Ergenekon" group, a cabal of generals and ultra-nationalists who planned bomb attacks and assassinations to trigger a military coup.

Critics claim the prosecutions are themselves part of a plot by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's Justice and Development Party to stifle Turkey's secular opposition.

On Monday afternoon, the court at the Silivri Prison Complex near Istanbul began announcing the verdicts individually of the 300 defendants, acquitting 21 of them but sentencing others to up to 20 years. Ilker Basbug, a former armed forces commander who was one of the best-known faces in the dock, received life imprisonment.

Earlier, security forces fired tear gas in fields around the courthouse as defendants' supporters gathered to protest against the trial, which has taken five years to complete and involved more than 8,000 pages of indictments.

Critics, including the main opposition party, have said the charges are aimed at intimidating the secularist establishment which dominated Turkey until Mr Erdogan's party came to power. "This is Erdogan's trial, it is his theatre," Umut Oran, a parliamentarian with the opposition CHP party, told Reuters.

"In the 21st century for a country that wants to become a full member of the European Union, this obvious political trial has no legal basis."

Mr Erdogan's government insists that the threat of a coup is not far-fetched, pointing out that secularist military staged three coups in Turkey between 1960 and 1980, and pushed the first Islamist-led government out of office in 1997.

The trial follows large-scale protests by Turkish secularists earlier this summer, who accused Mr Erdogan's government of being cracking down on social freedoms in its bid to take the country down a more Islamist path.

The Ergenekon investigation was sparked in June 2007 when weapons and explosives were discovered during an anti-terrorist operation in an Istanbul suburb.

It is one of a series of cases in which members of the Turkish army, the second biggest in NATO, have faced prosecution for alleged coup plots against an elected government.

In a separate case dubbed "Sledgehammer," more than 300 hundred active and retired army officers, including three former generals, received prison sentences of up to 20 years over a 2003 military exercise alleged to have been an undercover coup plot.